


Search & Rescue

by Huggle



Series: Pay Your Dues [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abused Castiel (Supernatural), Castiel Whump, Dark Dean Winchester, Dark Sam Winchester, Gabriel to the Rescue, Gen, Human Castiel, Hurt Castiel, Protective Gabriel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 16:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10495413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huggle/pseuds/Huggle
Summary: How an old hunter came to be Castiel's salvation because of a nearly forgotten promise - and how Bobby saved an angel even after he'd passed on.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of Sequel to Pay Your Dues.

Chapter One

Generally, Archangels didn’t feel fear. They were the fiercest weapons of Heaven, the celestial equivalent of a Death Star, what had they to be scared of?

But then Lucifer had thrown the strop of all time, and Michael had almost killed him before sealing him up in Hell. Dad had disappeared and Zachariah had starting whispering poison to all and sundry. Raphael listened to Zachariah, and Michael listened to Raphael and around the same time they both stopped listening to him.

Even then he hadn’t been scared. It was a storm in a hell of a big teacup, but any day their Father would come back and Lucifer would be able to come home and he and Michael would kiss and make up and Gabriel would go shove Zachariah off a really high cloud somewhere. Nobody would mind.

But God didn’t come back. Michael and Raphael locked themselves away, and there were hints and rumours about some kind of plan to fix things, to sort out the humans who were to blame for all their problems.

Gabriel had been thrown at that one. God was the one who’d told them to put humanity first, to protect and love them above all else. Yes, that had led to their family drama, but maybe three quarters of the little apes didn’t even believe they existed.

It wasn’t like they’d been consulted on their place in the pecking order.

But neither of his brothers would see him or speak with him, and as things started gearing up Gabriel realised where they were heading.

If he couldn’t stop it, he at least didn’t have to be around to watch.

Faking his death didn’t take much, and he didn’t even lose his Grace. Nobody threw the switch to cut off a dead archangel, and once he’d created his Trickster persona it was the perfect cover.

Wondering how things were going upstairs wasn’t the same as looking back though. He told himself that and sometimes he even believed it.

But he couldn’t ignore the signs; lesser angels being murdered or corrupted. Raphael raising an army, with Zachariah as it’s general, and Michael saying nary a word as they tromped around like Heaven sent Stormtroopers. 

The first time he met Dean and Sam, he was pretty sure they were just as fucked as everyone else – and he was including himself in that by then. But their sheer stubborn pain in the ass determination piqued his interest. Ok, so he had killed Dean a couple of hundred times, and the TV Land stunt was a shitty trick to pull on anyone, but since it had reunited him with Castiel he couldn’t chide himself too much.

But it had also put him on a collision course with his freed older brother.

Even when he was facing Lucifer down, he hadn’t been too afraid. By then he had creating doubles of himself down to a science, and it was a worthy performance if he did say so himself. Though even then he’d known he shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place, should probably have flown in the other direction the first time he’d encountered anyone named Winchester.

But he wasn’t the only angel to come to grief because of those two bastards.

Looking back, he should never have given Castiel back to them. Or he should have sent them on their way with another double, and kept his brother safe and by his side.

The only time he’d really been afraid was when he’d picked Castiel up and felt how close his brother – his hurt, human little brother – was to death, and then afraid didn’t really cover it.

No word in existence came anywhere close.

Chapter Two

“It’s like this,” Bobby said, and laid it out for him.

Eddie listened, the urge to call bullshit driven out of him by the look on Bobby’s face. Hell, he could pull your chain sometimes even if it generally wasn’t in his nature. But no, that wasn’t this. 

Bobby was deadly serious, and Eddie figured he wasn’t drunk enough to really deal with this.

“That’s all I’m asking for,” Bobby said. “For you to keep an eye on them. All three of them, because once I’m gone nobody else will.”

“The boys, I get,” Eddie said. “But the other one? I mean, are you sure on this, Bobby?”

“Little shit knocked me out with two fingers to my forehead,” Bobby said. “And the things I’m seen him do… But he can suffer as much as we can, and he took a stand for us. Maybe I’ve just got a thing about fatherless kids.”

Eddie already knew that about him, and he figured if he was adopting this _Castiel_ the way he had Dean and Sam, that made the angel pretty damn special. And he owed Bobby, always would, so he said yes even if he had no real idea how to offer help to _Winchesters_ and no real conviction it’d be accepted. Or the same with the angel.

Anyway, Bobby’d live to see them all out.

Eddie believed that right up until he heard some fucking monster had put a bullet in him and he was gone.

And he thought about his promise, he did, but shit was going wrong everywhere all at once – weird stories reaching him, people he knew acting like he didn’t know them at all.

So he kind of went to ground, and the photo Bobby had given him – it kind of looked like he’d taken it on the fly – stayed stuffed in the glovebox of his truck until a good many months later, when he was cleaning the damn thing out and found it.

By then he’d heard that the Winchesters were dead too, and he figured if they were then the angel was as well, and he lamented his broken word. 

Right up until the three of them showed up in his store, after hours, with Dean Winchester expressing interest in a book they’d heard he had for sale.

And Eddie wondered what the hell Bobby would think of them now.

~~

So after that, he’d done some digging. Reached out, on the quiet, to anybody he knew still alive who knew the Winchesters and wasn’t exactly on friendly terms with them. Less chance of word getting back that way to them about his ‘discreet enquiries’.

What he heard chilled him.

When he took to following them himself, and he was the best at tailing a car, always had been, what he witnessed made him disgusted and raging in the same instant.

Because if they were treating the angel that bad in public, he couldn’t imagine what was going on behind the doors of that bunker.

But what to do about it was the problem. He was way older than both those boys, no way he could just show up and snatch the angel away. He’d end up dead. He needed help, but there weren’t a lot of people dumb enough to face down the Winchesters, and even the other hunters who didn’t like them had a healthy respect for them.

They wouldn’t believe they were keeping an angel prisoner. And how the hell were they managing that anyway? The hurt, skinny thing that he’d set back onto his feet didn’t sound like the creature Bobby had described.

He’d just looked like a guy.

A guy in serious need of rescue, of help, before those two did anything worse to him.

Who cared enough, though, about Castiel to help Eddie save him? 

Chapter Three

“This is almost like that time you summoned me,” Gabriel said, and Eddie jumped so high he nearly cracked his head off the roof.

“I know you can heal me, and all,” the human complained, “but maybe you could not scare the shit out of me by just showing up like that?”

Gabriel gave him a sharp grin. Once a trickster…. Hell, who was he kidding? He’d always loved jump scares. “You get it?”

Eddie reached into the glove box and removed a small box. He handed it to Gabriel, and squinted against the blue glow as the angel opened it up. “You sure that it’s….”

Gabriel ran a finger along the vial the box contained. He nodded, and Eddie wanted to pull back on instinct at the look on his face. “Yeah. You run into any problems?”

“Not getting it, as such, no,” Eddie said. “The spells you give me, they all worked. Got me in, helped me find it, got me out. But, Gabriel, those Winchesters-“

Gabriel closed the lid with a loud clack, and the look he fixed on Eddie made him rethink the wisdom of mentioning his brother’s abusers in the confines of the car. Or anywhere on the planet. “What about them?”

“Word’s out they’re looking for him. Everybody I know, they’ve either been approached direct or been asked to pass the message on. If anybody sees him, keep a hold of him until they get there. They’re making out he’s had some sort of breakdown, got bit by something, so he’ll be talking all kinds of crazy. They want him back bad, Gabriel, Dean especially.”

“Surprise,” Gabriel muttered. He stared out at the night for a moment, and then glanced at Eddie. “Any of these people likely to tattle on you?”

Eddie paled. He hadn’t thought about that, hadn’t expected the brothers to want the angel back. Hadn’t expected to find anyone to help him with the rescue of the angel. Certainly hadn’t expected to find mention in an old text about a battle involving the archangel Gabriel and the Angel of Thursday and the total ass kicking some beast had taken for trying to tear Castiel’s wings off. Certainly hadn’t expected Gabriel to even answer the summons.

The only thing he could expect, he realised now, was that someone sometime was going to mention offhand the interest he’d shown in tracking the three of them down and then he’d have days until those two found him.

“It’d be a fair bet,” he said, hating that his voice wasn’t steady but not ready to blame himself too much. They’d imprisoned and mistreated their own damn family. What the hell would they do to him?

“Ok,” Gabriel said. He snapped his fingers and a card appear in his hand, which he passed over. Eddie glanced at it. There was an address, simply printed.

“What’s this?”

Gabriel grinned. “A safehouse of sorts. Keep that card on you at all times – it’s the key. Trust me, nothing else is getting in or out, not even Dean and Sam Winchester.”

Eddie slipped it into his pocket. He was grateful, for sure, but all the same…. “I can’t just stay in hiding for the rest of my life, Gabriel.”

Gabriel nodded. “No. Just for the rest of theirs.”

Then he was gone.

Chapter Four 

Sam turned in, leaving Dean alone in the semi-darkness, a half done bottle of whiskey on the table next to him.

They’d tried fucking everything – spells, catching demons, bribery, the network. It was like Cas had just vanished with no clue where he’d gone.

Dean was sure he’d heard something that night, but he’d been so damned tired – unnaturally tired, and Sam had reported the same thing the next morning – that he hadn’t been able to get up to check.

When he’d finally came to hours later, unlocking the angel’s door had been the first thing he’d done, only to find Cas was gone.

It hadn’t been possible – the lock on that door couldn’t be picked, not even by an expert. And Dean, Dean had seemed just as certain it shouldn’t have been possible for Cas to even attempt it. To even get up.

He’d lapsed into silence, and Sam had pushed, and Dean had sullenly admitted things had gotten a little rough. He hadn’t said anything else, so Sam had gone back to Cas’s room, and now that he wasn’t stunned at it being empty he took the time to actually look at it.

There was blood soaked through the rough woollen blanket on the bed. Spatter on the walls, as if someone had got hit with something hard and the blood had carried. The bed was the only furniture Cas was allowed, but the headboard had a dent in it about the size of a fist.

Sam imagined Cas managing to dodge a blow, and he was willing to bet that had just made Dean hit all the harder.

He felt a little sick. He’d never been one for beating Cas, had tried to mollify Dean when he got that look in his eye. But he couldn’t keep watch on his brother all the time, and there’d been no sign Dean was about to lose it when Sam had turned in.

It didn’t answer the question of where Cas was now.

He headed back to the war room, where Dean was rolling an empty beer bottle back and forward on the map table. 

“You’re right,” Sam said. “It looks like you beat him so bad he probably couldn’t have gotten out of there under his own steam. Even if the door wasn’t locked.”

Dean didn’t look at him. “We’re down an angel and you’re getting pissy because I disciplined him.”

“Disciplined? Dean, not letting him eat for a day is disciplining. Making him take an hour long cold shower? That’s disciplining. Beating him half to death? I thought you wanted to keep him around. Show him, make him…get it.”

“He got it last night.”

Sam clenched his fists, focused on keeping calm and not becoming as argumentative as his brother.

“Fine. But now he isn’t there, and the door was locked, and by all accounts crawling should have been beyond him. So the question is, how did he get out?”

Dean shrugged but Sam could see the dark look on his face. He should have expected Dean to take things too far one day, but he could also see how furious Dean was. That Cas dared to leave… Or had allowed himself to be taken out of the bunker. Because the more Sam considered it, the more Cas had to have help. 

He just couldn’t figure out who from, but one thing was sure – if Cas was smart, he’d stay well hidden. Not that it would help – Sam wasn’t prepared to just let Cas go, either – but the longer he stayed off Dean’s radar the more time Sam would have to make sure when they finally found Cas, Dean didn’t just beat him to death on the spot.

Chapter Five

When Gabriel handed over the vial with his Grace, Cas had almost seemed to afraid to take it. Like it was some kind of dream and he might wake up just as salvation was within his grasp – wake up and find himself back in hell.

Not the literal hell, but one close enough and of the making of the two humans who’d proclaimed themselves Cas’s family.

The hate that flooded Gabriel every time he saw Cas flinch at a sudden movement, stall as a particularly unpleasant memory twisted inside of him, made it very hard not to return to that bunker and tear it out of the ground, crumple it up like a wad of paper with those two bastards inside and then forget about them.

But he didn’t. He focused instead on being as slow and calm around Cas as he could, and when he felt the edge of panic start to show he just reached out with his Grace at first – Cas didn’t tolerate physical closeness – to soothe and reassure. To tell his little brother he was there, and he wasn’t about to let anybody hurt him again.

After a couple of weeks, Cas let Gabriel touch him physically. Even let himself be held. Not that Gabriel was the hugging type, generally, but…something told him Cas needed it, just couldn’t ask.

That was something else he’d noticed. Cas couldn’t express his needs. No matter how simple or how complicated. Whether they were physical or emotional. That, Gabriel suspected, had started long before the Winchesters had taken him captive.

Guilt burned in him, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that he was putting it right now, that he hadn’t known, hadn’t really had any reason to suspect that Dean and Sam were a hundred times worse than Alastair and his ilk. At least they came at you as they were – didn’t hide their true nature.

Gabriel was sorely tempted not to hide his….to go and deal with the two of them as they deserved.

But it was Castiel they’d wronged. And though he loathed the idea, Gabriel suspected if he raised a hand against either boy, Castiel might turn against him and flee. Angel or human, Gabriel knew he was all Cas had left now.

So he kept a casual distance as Cas uncapped the vial, and felt the surge of relief as the glowing blue Grace settled back inside his brother, restoring him in an instant.

Physically, at least, but the rest Gabriel would work on.


End file.
